Tag: Debra Kaye

2013 Holiday Book List

Friday, December 13th, 2013

I’ve read dozens of business books this year, and reviewed at least one each month for OPEN. If you’re looking for a thoughtful gift for the business book-lover in your life, you simply cannot go wrong with any of these 15 picks!

To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others, by Daniel H. Pink. Bestselling author Pink argues that selling has changed more in the past 10 years than it did over the previous hundred. “We’re all in sales now,” Pink says. “One in nine Americans—some 15 million people—make a living trying to get others to make a purchase. But the other eight in nine work in sales, too—we’re persuading and influencing others to give up resources in exchange for something we have.”

Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works, by A.G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin. Martin, one the world’s foremost authorities on strategy and former dean of the progressive Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, teams with one of the top CEOs of all time, Lafley, of Proctor & Gamble. Together they boil strategy down to two critical questions: Where to play? How to win?

Red Thread Thinking: Weaving Together Connections for Brilliant Ideas and Profitable Innovation, by Debra Kaye. Innovation demands looking at the world differently and finding connections between seemingly disconnected things. According to Kaye, the book’s theme is based on an Oriental legend, which she believes provides a powerful metaphor for the way in which the right connections can lead to brilliant insights and ultimately result in commercially viable innovations.

What’s the Future of Business? Changing the Way Businesses Create Experiences, by Brian Solis. Solis argues that now is the time every business must go beyond price, performance or value. “The future of business is about creating experiences,” Solis writes. “Products, programs and processes that evoke splendor and rekindle meaningful and sincere interaction and growth. At the center of this evolution—or (r)evolution—is the experience.”

The Fearless Front Line: The Key to Liberating Leaders to Improve and Grow Their Business, by Ray Attiyah. Attiyah argues that all too often, the front line activities of a business are so unpredictable, unreliable and complicated that business owners and leaders can’t seem to pull themselves away from them. But if you’re spending most of your time on the day-to-day operations of your business, you’ve left a critical gap.

Monster Loyalty: How Lady Gaga Turns Followers Into Fanatics, by Jackie Huba. The author argues that Lady Gaga hasn’t just created a brand but cultivated a fanatical group of consumers—”Little Monsters”—that will follow her for the next two decades of her career and beyond. Huba distills seven key strategies from the Gaga approach.

Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. The bestselling Heath brothers expose what’s wrong with how decisions are made by our political and business leaders, and by us individually in our personal lives—from how much we save for retirement to choosing a job, spouse or college. By curating the latest psychological research, the authors first reveal why our brains are hardwired to make foolish decisions.

CTRL ALT Delete: Reboot Your Business. Reboot Your Life. Your Future Depends on It, by Mitch Joel. According to Joel, we are in business purgatory, but he believes there’s a way of navigating out of it: reboot. Hence the title, a retro reference to the original Windows keyboard combination you’d use when your computer was frozen. Rebooting never moved you forward, but it did allow you to regain stable footing and position you to move in whichever direction you wished.

Disrupt! Think Epic. Be Epic, by Bill Jensen. Using the real-life stories of not only well-known business figures and founders but also everyday innovators who’ve created everything from a Craigslist for people with disabilities to a Pakistani school for young boys who had been indoctrinated into the Taliban, Jensen’s interviews offer an inside look at the character of some of today’s greatest change makers.

The Lean Entrepreneur: How Visionaries Create Products, Innovate with New Ventures, and Disrupt Markets, by Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits. The authors describe why our economy is primed for a new wave of entrepreneurship using new methods of disruptive innovation, then go on to provide real-world examples of how entrepreneurs are creating new markets and disrupting others. This books shows anyone interested in starting a new business or launching a new idea how to get started creating value.

Compelling People: The Hidden Qualities That Make Us Influential, by John Neffinger and Matthew Kohut. Everyone wants to know how to be more influential. But most of us don’t really think we can have the kind of magnetism or charisma that we associate with someone like Bill Clinton, Oprah Winfrey or Jon Stewart unless it comes naturally. According to the authors, however, it’s something we can learn, and they show us how in a book that’s already being taught at Harvard, Columbia and Georgetown.

Looptail: How One Company Changed the World by Reinventing Business, by Bruce Poon Tip. Looptail is Tip’s extraordinary first-person account of his entrepreneurial instincts to start and develop G Adventures, a highly successful international travel adventure company. Along the way, he reveals his unusual management secrets that not only keep his employees fully engaged but also keep his customers extremely happy.

The Myths of Creativity: The Truth About How Innovative Companies and People Generate Great Ideas, by David Burkus. Much has been written about creativity in business in an effort to understand just how great ideas are born, and much of it is just plain fiction, according to the author. Based on the latest research into how creative individuals and firms succeed, Burkus sets the record straight on 10 popular but mistaken beliefs.

Confidence: Overcoming Low Self-Esteem, Insecurity, and Self-Doubt, by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Ph.D. An internationally recognized personality expert exposes the dark side of confidence and offers a strong case for the upside of negativity and pessimism. Chamorro-Premuzic shatters much of the conventional thinking about confidence with compelling scientific research. The bottom line: Confidence is overrated.

Create Your Future The Peter Drucker Way, by Bruce Rosenstein. Rosenstein knows more about the most acclaimed management thinker of all time: the late Peter Drucker. He spent many hours with the man, and is both a student and scholar of “the Drucker way.” Drucker was always ahead of his time, but he wasn’t always easy to read, follow, or apply. That’s where this book come, because the author does just that.

NOTE: Republished in slightly different form from my OPEN column.

Red Thread Thinking

Monday, March 18th, 2013

Innovation demands looking at the world differently, and finding connections between seemingly disconnected things. A new book, called Red Thread Thinking: Weaving Together Connections for Brilliant Ideas and Profitable Innovation, by Debra Kaye, helps you do just that. In fact, Kaye walks her talk: Most books on innovation show how a particular innovation came about, then drawing lessons for the individual from the outcome. Kaye flips the paradigm, and focuses on where innovation starts–with the individual.

Kaye’s theme is based on an Oriental legend, which Kaye believes provides a powerful metaphor for the way in which the right connections can lead to brilliant insights and ultimately result in commercially viable innovations.

The tale centers on an elderly god who lives on the moon. He goes out every evening, taking a huge bag and a great book with him. In the bag are red threads, which are the ties between those who will find each other in this life. The god’s mission is to link these threads to all the people who will connect in this life in one way or another. “An invisible red thread connects those destined to meet, regardless of time, place or circumstance. The thread may stretch or tangle, but never break.”

“Just as people are destined to meet and connect,” writes Kaye,”So too the best innovations result from unexpected affinities and relationships among history, technology, culture, behavior, needs and emotions. Their destiny to meet and bond is within our reach. These red threads of innovation are the connecting strands of relationships woven of knowledge, memories and insights that together create a multi-textured fabric of seamless inter-connectivity.”

The book describes five red threads that we can use to create smart and practical innovations for everyday living. Kaye argues that anyone can develop a knack for this five-thread approach. “By weaving together unexpected threads, we become better at tapping into our own broad capacity to get past fixed ideas and assumptions in order to truly think outside of predetermined boxes – and that’s the ultimate business weapon.”

5 Red Threads

#1: Innovation is all in your head. Kaye synthesizes findings from the latest brain research and shows how to make your thinking sharper, clearer, unfettered and more imaginative. “Believe it or not, there’s a fountain of youth in your head – an eternal deluge of new ideas can spring from your brain.”

Red Thread Tip: Sleep on it. Research shows that your brain is very active when you sleep and information transfers from one part of the brain to another, so that new associations and connections can be made more freely without being from some sort of experience in your life.

#2: Everything old is new. Kaye demonstrates how to develop new relationships among a collection of existing parts – what you already have on hand and know about or can access – which can combine in new ways to innovate new products. Conventional wisdom holds that innovation is about the future, but Kaye explains why it’s actually about what’s already present.

For example, the Gutenberg Press, which forever changed the world of communication, was based on ancient Chinese moveable type, the wine press from the vintners in Rhineland and Gutenberg’s own metallurgy experience.

Red Thread Tip: Most “original” ideas aren’t completely original, so look for new ideas within those that already exist.

#3: Consumers are the strangest animals in the zoo. Kaye discusses behavior and culture and how to glean vital insights from observing consumers “on the job,” just living and doing what comes naturally, and how to leverage hidden cultural meanings that explain why consumers behave in certain ways. The good news here for small business owners is that you won’t need to out-spend and out-market the big guys because you are working within a consumer habit, not trying to break it.

“Look what can play into people’s existing behavior,” Kaye advises. “Many innovators make the mistake of thinking a new product must change people’s behavior. That’s hard to do. It is much easier to look at their habits and just create a new fit.”

For example, returning from a family vacation and lugging baggage around the airport, Bernard Sadow saw a customs agent effortlessly roll a heavy machine with the help of a skid with wheels. A little jerry rigging and the first wheeled luggage was born.

Red Thread Tip: Ask unexpected questions. How you frame a question is often the biggest path to new ideas. Jay Walker, the creator of Priceline.com, could have created another aggregator traveler site that offers the best prices and schedules. Instead he turned the tables. He asked hotels and airlines what they might accept. Consumers are now in a position to set prices, and as a result he opened a whole new way of doing business.

#4: What you see is what you get (WYSIWYG). This thread is about communicating an idea in a way that gives consumers an immediate picture of its point of difference. As Kaye writes: “Iconography, the perfect reduction of information to a single, unmistakable sign that can be quickly communicated, seems to be the forgotten stepchild of design strategy, language and simplification.”

Red Thread Tip: Learn how to create an entirely new language and simplify to the feature you want to highlight to create a story that is truly unique; then communicate in a way that can be universally understood. You’ll be amazed at the success of innovation that makes for simpler experiences and interactions.

#5: The force of passion. When you come up with a new idea, lots of people are going to think you’re crazy. You have to listen carefully and know if the naysayers are simply being dismissive, or if they are identifying real problems. Without sustained passion, it can be difficult to absorb criticism with an open mind and a neutral perspective. If you can’t, you’ll kick yourself when someone else comes up with a similar idea and gets to market before you because they persevered until they found that one small breakthrough or the critical tweak that made the product work.

Red Thread Tip: Think that you are a genius. Attitude and belief in your own abilities makes you more curious and open-minded and more willing to take professional and intellectual risks. The more you believe you can stretch yourself, the more you will think of your capacity to be smarter and you may just be so.

Red Thread Thinking is a worthwhile read. You can use it to sharpen your original-thinking skills, help solve tough problems, prepare a talk, pitch, or manage your business in a new and more productive way.

And as Kaye concludes: “Red Thread Thinking can become a way of life, a natural part of how you see the world, ask questions, approach new information, and achieve success.”

Reprinted from my monthly OPEN column.